Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The use of programmable hardware, such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), can yield substantial benefits in energy efficiency and processing speed in computing devices. FPGAs can be programmed with Programmable Hardware Accelerators (PHAs) that specialize in accelerating certain types of operations, for example, video decoding operations and encryption/decryption operations, among others. PHAs can often process their specialized operations more efficiently than general purpose processors. Computer systems may be adapted to use PHAs to process the specialized operations for which they are programmed, while other computing tasks may be processed by general purpose processors such as processors in a computer's Central Processing Unit (CPU).
PHAs deployed at data centers can increase the computing efficiency of applications executed by data center customers. Both data centers and data center customers stand to benefit from adoption of PHAs in the form of lower data center costs and faster performance. However, data center customers who are unfamiliar with the potential advantages of PHAs may be slow to adopt them, to the disadvantage of the customer and the data center.